Fort Collins

We left Fort Collins after a week’s stay. Some of our activities included:

• Farmers Markets – Ft. Collins has two, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. One of my favorite food vendors makes pita chips and various flavors of hummus. On Saturday, Mitzi’s Flowers is always a stop so Dad can tease his friend Mitzi for a bit. He continues the cut flower tradition that Mom so loved having in the kitchen.
• We got together with my brother, Kenny, sister-in-law, Susie, and their two “roommates” as Susie calls them. The twins are students at CSU, but crash at home when not working or in class or out with friends. Tash and Bella are now of legal age so we toasted their grandmother with her favorite adult beverage – margaritas!
• Dad continues to co-garden with a neighbor who was currently out of town. I assisted with picking cucumbers, zucchini, green beans, strawberries and raspberries. With temperatures in the upper 90s, daily watering helped the garden continue to look beautiful. I also helped many Japanese beetles meet their demise by drowning. These pests were mostly on the raspberries and rose blooms and can decimate a garden quickly.
• I accompanied my dad to a lunch out with some of his co-workers from Denver. It was fun to hear about gardening, and traveling in a Tesla to National parks and monuments and living in Sweden for two years – cool adventures! Tony and I both joined dad’s “Bindweed Pullers” group for breakfast. This group of volunteers meet for food and life stories and book discussions. Several are retired teachers and book lovers. Bruce and Sheri follow our blog (yay-thank you!) and are soon taking their travel trailer on a Dakotas adventure.
• Usain got some upgrades from Owl Off Road that Tony has detailed out on our website (see Usain Mods). This company is located in Longmont, just north of Denver. Very convenient for us to get there from Ft. Collins.

Thunderhead Brewing

We decided to make it a 2-day trip home to make it easier on ourselves and the cats. Our final stop for the night on this adventure was Thunderhead Brewing, a Harvest Host in Axtell, Nebraska. It’s about 15 miles south of I-80, so we detoured off of the interstate at North Platte, Nebraska to get away from the typical heavy truck traffic for a while.

At Thunderhead, we met another Harvest Host couple heading back to Pennsylvania in their huge fifth-wheel. They had come out to Iowa City for a wedding then did some traveling out west to see some parks and monuments that we have also been to. Fun to compare notes and look at their awesome footage of buffalos crossing the road in Custer State Park. We joined their texting group for the game Connections, which Tony and I do together every day.

Home Again! For a while…

Our final leg home was uneventful. We enjoyed seeing the farming life throughout Nebraska, including a couple of crop dusters gracefully flying low over the corn then banking around to come back for another pass. Every state has something beautiful to see!

I’ll end with a picture of our two traveling companions, Catnip and Primrose. We arrived home on an unusually cool day for Iowa and were able to open up the house to air it out. We have a couple of out-of-country trips coming up, so we won’t be back traveling in Usain until December when we head south for the winter again this winter.